American IPA v3

So far I have not been satisfied with my attempts to brew hoppy beers like IPAs. Generally, the hop character in my IPAs has not been fresh and assertive enough, and in my attempt at a Cascade Session IPA, I ended up with a harsh, weird bitterness. I'm not sure what the problem has been. Possible issues (in no particular order) have been:

• Poorly stored hops. Although all the hops I have bought were stored in a freezer both pre- and post- purchase, some of them have come in vacuum-sealed oxygen barrier bags (optimal) and some have just been in a big bin at the LHBS (sub-optimal). Hops stored warm and / or exposed to oxygen will get stale, with less aroma and an oxidized character. 
• Poor water adjustment. I brew with water from Brookline, Mass., which according to the LHBS guys does not really need adjustment, even for hoppy beers like IPAs. In any case, I don't think this is the issue because brewing books like Brewing Classic Styles say that unless your water is really alkaline or super soft it should be the last think to be dialed in, after you've gotten the rest of the recipe / process to where you want it. 
• Poor wort cooling. The conventional wisdom seems to be that be that the wort should be cooled as rapidly as possible because, among other benefits, doing so prevents delicate hop volatiles from dissipating with the heat of the wort. On the other hand, there is apparently some benefit to "hop-standing", a practice in which hops are added to the hot wort before it is cooled, or alternatively, when the wort is at 170F or so, then left for around 10 mins before cooling the rest of the way.
• One thing I am not sure of is the temperature at which the hop character is no longer boiling off. My wort chiller is pretty fast in lowering the wort to around 110F, but has problems getting it lower in a reasonable time-frame. 
• Overpitching yeast. As the yeast flocculates it binds to hop compounds and drops them to the bottom of the beer. Overpitching can exacerbate this tendency. I usually pitch most or all of an 11g dry yeast packet into my beers, which is probably overpitching, though when using liquid or re-used dry yeast, I usually make a 1L starter, which is about right. 
• Excessively long dry hopping. Leaving dry-hops in the beer for more than about a week can result in a vegetal flavor. I do not think this has been an issue because I have never put dry hops in for longer than a week. 
• Poor storage of bottled beer. Once the beer has been carbed by bottle conditioning, it should be cooled to a pretty cool temperature to preserve the delicate hop compounds. I don't have the capacity to do this as of yet. 

For this next attempt at an IPA, I will be addressing some of these problems, though not all of them. The brewing notes should indicate how I have done so. This recipe does not call for dry hopping, so I will be trying to get the right aroma by proper cooling and use of fresh ingredients.

The recipe is more or less from Brewing Classic Styles, with a couple of hop substitutions because my LHBS doesn't always have the right hops or because I want to use up hops in my freezer. During the brewday I upped the IBUs to 80 from the original 68. Why not? I like hoppy beers.

American IPA Version 3.0
3.2 gallons

7# 8oz American 2-Row Pale
8oz Crystal 40
8oz Crystal 20
2oz Victory

Mash at 151F.

5/8oz Magnum, 12.6%AA and 5/8oz Chinook, 11.7%AA 60 min
3/4oz Centennial, 5min
1oz Simcoe (leaf), 1min
.5oz Amarillo, post-boil @ 150F, 10min
.5oz Cascade, post-boil @ 150F, 10min

S-05 yeast, fermented at 65F.

Expected OG / FG / IBUs: 1.067 / 1.018 / 80.

Brewed on 11/21/12

At noon, made a starter of about 3 cups of wort with reused US-05 yeast.

Hit my mash temps as planned.

Collected about 2.1 gallons of first runnings. Ended up with a total of about 4.25 gallons. So I think I'll do a 75min boil to get the volume down to about 3.25 gallons. I really need a sight glass for my kettle to be able to accurately measure my volumes.

Boiled hard for 15mins before adding first hop addition. The pre-boil OG was 1.049 at 4.25 gallons (or so) which is a crappy efficiency of 66%. But I don't think my volume measurements are accurate enough to really measure these things properly.

The "hop stand" left for 10mins.

Added the post-boil hops when the wort was 148F and let stand for ten minutes before using the IC and a water bath to cool to 85F, then let sit in ambient air around 45F for a while to finish cooling.

Transferred and aerated when the wort was still about 75F, but placed bucket in a bath of 65F water. Pitched yeast. I got barely above 3 gallons (including the yeast starter) in the fermenter due to a trub / hop loss volume of more that .5 gallon. That's annoying. I'd like to find a way to minimize the amount of wort loss. After all, when dealing with 3 gallon batches 1/2 gallon is a 17% loss. Perhaps using a "Hopshot" for bittering hops is a good idea, or perhaps some type of DIY hop strainer.

11/23/12

FG Reading

The brew is now sitting in 65F ambient air temps, and showing some signs of fermentation, but as yet it appears to be fermenting slowly. Perhaps my low temps have resulted in a slow takeoff or perhaps my bucket is still a little leaky (even tough I replaced the little black grommet) and some of the CO2 is escaping somewhere other than the airlock, reducing the apparent strength of the fermentation.

11/24/12
The beer appears to be fermenting strongly, with frequent bubbles in the airlock. Yay!

12/4/12
Bottled today with 1.75oz sugar, aiming for 2 volumes of CO2. I got 29 x 12oz bottles and about a pint of beer left in the bottling bucket. Final OG was 1.010. A little low. The beer smelled moderately hoppy but had a pretty good hop bitterness. I think this will be pretty good.